'How are things going?' I asked Pepperidge.

'Oh,' he said cheerfully, 'we soldier on, you know. Did they tell you about her, then?'

'Yes.'

He nodded, picking up a spanner, looking at it. We were out in the little toolshed at the back, where she couldn't hear us, not that she'd pass anything on, I was sore; it was just bur natural habit to drift somewhere but of earshot, wherever we were. 'She hasn't got anyone due, you see. Poor old George went — oh, it must be five or six years ago now. I'm all she's got left.' He gave a dry laugh, watching me with his yellow eyes in the half-light of the shed, the shadow of his rather ragged moustache, hiding most of his mouth. Been mending the lawn mower,' he said, putting the spanner down, 'though the grass is pretty well dead.'

The word dropped into the silence like a stone into a pool, irretrievably, and I saw the slight tightening of the skin across his sharp cheekbones; then it was over. 'Know anything about lawn mowers?'

'You have to push them along, don't you?'

'Only if you can't wheedle out of it. They got the fidgets again, have they?'

'Yes.'

'Anything to do with the Chinese ambassador?'

It had been on the nine-o'clock news.

'I can't really tell you anything,' I said, 'because they've thrown a blackout across it. All I really came for was to find out if you'd be interested in taking it on.'

'Directing you?'

'Yes.'

In a moment he said, 'It was nice of you to bring her flowers.'

She'd put them straight into a vase, and shown them to him when he'd come back. 'She's a pretty woman,' I said.

'I suppose she is.' He was thinking about what I'd been saying, about the mission.

'She ought to get married again,' I told him.

'Why not? Why not…' He brushed some dry grass cuttings off the edge of the worn bench. 'No one phoned me, I suppose you know that?'

'Hyde was going to, but I said I wanted to come here on my own, see how things were, sound you out.'

'That was kind.' He stared through the little cracked window, where there was a piece of paper sticking: Get blades ground. 'Hyde's going to run it?'

'Yes.'

'He pick me?'

'No. He asked me who I wanted.'

'You couldn't get Ferris?' The gray October light touched his face at an angle from the window; he wasn't all that old, perhaps forty, but the skin had shrivelled into fine lines across his cheeks, like a balloon almost deflated. He'd been out East a lot.

'Ferris hasn't got Chinese,' I said. But he knew that I must have tried for Ferris and couldn't get him. 'It's very big, this one. Very big indeed.'

'Or they wouldn't have asked for you.'

'I was available. It wouldn't keep us out there too long, so Hyde said. A matter of days, all going well.'

'Days?' He turned his head to look at me. 'Sounds pretty concentrated.'

'That's why MI6 wouldn't touch it.'

'They were approached first?'

'Yes. The thing is, we're talking about looking after someone out there, and he's going to be right in the spotlight. We might have to do things they can't.' The Bureau doesn't officially exist, but the other services are expected to keep their house clean, not get into anything wet. They're specifically public servants, whereas you could call us, I suppose, a maverick force, answerable only to the PM.

'Looking after someone,' Pepperidge said, puckering his thin mouth. 'There's already one down, isn't there?'

'Yes.'

He meant the Chinese Ambassador. They'd come in very early, the opposition, though not early enough: the meeting we'd had would provide the blueprint for the whole mission. My guess was that Qiao hadn't been discreet since the uprising of '89, when he'd become 'disgusted.' It couldn't have been easy for him to hide a, in the confines of his embassy in London. Or perhaps he'd talked to his brother, and his brother had been put under the screws out there, and Beijing intelligence had signalled their agents here in London: Get Qiao.

'The other chap came through, though,' Pepperidge said, 'didn't he?'

Hou Jing, the little counsellor. 'They said his briefcase saved him. There was a lot of stuff in it.'

'Close shot?' He was still watching me.

'Passing car.'

'There were some policemen killed, it said on the-'

'Three. It was an assault rifle.'

'Those bloody things. I suppose there wasn't anything like a bit of kevlar in that briefcase, was there?'

'I thought of that too.'

In this trade we are steeped, as I told you, in subterfuge. Hou Jing could have worked as a spotter.

Pepperidge looked through the window again, and got a piece of rag and wiped some of the grime off, but most of it was outside in the air, fog pressing down form a steel-gray sky. 'Let's go in,' he said, 'and talk to Gladys."

She was in the kitchen, scraping at the bottom of a burned saucepan, her thin body leaning against the sink; I would imagine she got tired easily.

'You go,' she said, when Pepperidge put it to her — we were in the sitting room now, where the cat was arched like a drawn bow with its claws on the settee and its haunches flat on the carpet. 'I'll be perfectly all right here,' she said. 'Don't, Smoky! I've got friends who come in, Doris and Marjorie.' She didn't ask how long he was talking about, I think in case it was a long time and she'd feel scared and we'd see it.

'It's only for a few days,' her brother said quickly.

'Oh,' relieved, 'then what's all the fuss?' A pretty smile, radiating life.

'If you go out, Glad, I don't want you walking any farther than Tesco.'

'All right.'

'And don't carry anything too heavy. Doris has got her car.'

'I've never heard such a fuss! Now off you go, for goodness sake.' She picked up the cat and held it while she came to the front door with us. 'It was so nice of you to bring the flowers.' The smile of a young girl, shy and vulnerable. I couldn't take her hand because of the cat, so I kissed her cheek and we went out, Pepperidge and I, and got into the Lamborghini.

'Nice hot cuppa, love?'

'Please.'

She looked at me from under the heavy false lashes. 'Do you good.'

She mopped the plastic table top and limped off to the tea urn with her arthritic hip. You think your nerves aren't showing, but Daisy will catch the vibrations.

Pepperidge had been put on a plane for Hong Kong an hour ago and I'd been cleared and briefed and there was nothing to do now, nowhere to go while I waited, as the light lowered in the basement window, the winter seeping into the room like a cold shadow, dimming the light bulbs, bringing a chill to the air. They'd overdone the thermostat thing when Hyde had sent his instructions, and now this bloody place was as cold as the grave.

'There you are, love.'

'Thank you, Daisy.'

'What about a nice buttered bun?'

'All right.'

For something to do, I sat with my hands around the cup of tea to warm them. Anyone forming the actual intention of putting this stuff into his body would be clean off his rocker: it's jet-black and there's enough caffeine in it to blast the back end off a bulldog. What we really come down here for is to escape the madhouse going quietly on upstairs along those bleak and dimly lighted corridors and behind the doors of those unnamed and unnumbered rooms, with signals coming in from the mast at Cheltenham and traffic going out from Codes and Cyphers, the whole giddy circus engaged in the sinister task of dealing with lies and secrets, subversion and betrayal, in the name of the need to know.

'There you are, duck.'

Margarine, not butter, but what can you do? What they budget for in this place is to buy loyalty, to put a price on trust, to replace a car full of bullet holes at some far frontier post, to arrange, when things go wrong, for funerals, to fork out a widow's pension.